Earthaven is unlike almost every other North American ecovillage I know of, because it’s a village within a village. Our 329-acre property is surrounded by adjacent and nearby neighbors and friends who participate in and contribute to our developing ecovillage life and culture.

I first realized this when I first visited Findhorn, a large, well-known, 60-year-old intentional community and ecovillage in northern Scotland. The early Findhorn community, founded in 1962 in rented trailers on a 15-acre mobile home park, is the original village. Over the years the wider ecovillage developed out beyond its borders as former community members moved nearby and new people moved to the area specifically to contribute to and participate in the new spiritually oriented, ecologically aware culture Findhorn was developing. (Short video of Findhorn Community. )

The original community, the Findhorn Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization (now about 50 members), soon bought the mobile home park, The Park. Approximately 450 Findhorn-affiliated friends and neighbors live in various degrees of proximity to the Foundation, renting mobile homes or bungalows in The Park or living in several adjacent housing developments, including the Field of Dreams project and East Whins Cohousing. Others live in the small fishing village at one end of the peninsula, or in Kinloss, a larger village on the other mainland end of the peninsula, and in the small Scottish city of Forres, three miles away. Another Findhorn Foundation property, Cluny Hill, hosts educational events in a former hotel two miles past Forres. Many of these Findhorn villagers run businesses with a product or service, or a nonprofit with a mission, that resonates closely with the Foundation’s values. These include a wind generator co-op, a dairy co-op, a car co-op, a health food store, a credit union, a Waldorf school, and an Earth-restoration project helping to reforest the Scottish highlands.

While Findhorn had 60 years to develop this way, Earthaven started becoming a village within a village in the last 15 years or so. Members of our ecovillage family include, like Findhorn, former community members who moved next door or nearby, people interested in membership who didn’t end up joining us but still wanted to participate and live nearby, and longtime Scots-Irish neighbors who visit often and share their Southern Appalachian homestead lore. Other village members are visitors, especially people who attended Earthaven’s School of Integrated Living (SOIL) educational programs, like Earthaven Experience Week, so drawn to our values and culture they rent homes onsite or nearby. Many have become dues-paying members of our Earthaven Community Association along with most Earthaven members.

I believe Earthaven is one of the few communities in North America like this. Some former members of Sirius Community in Massachusetts live nearby and attend weekly dinners. But Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri, which is similar to Earthaven in many ways, has no friends living nearby because their neighbors, mostly retired Mennonite dairy and soybean farmers, don’t offer rentals.

Wonderful neighbors in our village family include Leon Birstein and Geni Stephenson, who’ve been integral parts of our lives since our earliest days. Geni brings fresh produce and other homestead products from their organic farm to our weekly Coffee and Trade farmers market, operates a pottery studio some of our members use too, manages five small rental units adjacent to our property for new people considering Earthaven membership, and opens the Zendo on their property for morning and evening meditations. Leon, who built the Zendo and their homestead, runs the farm with another neighbor, Jonathan Greenberg, innovates useful ways to run a homestead (which many of us copy), and serves as an electrical, plumbing, and general homesteading expert for many of us.

Tricia and John Baehr and their children have contributed in numerous ways, John providing physical labor in various community workdays, and Tricia, a superb cook, hosting various village celebrations, catering various celebration events for members, and offering educational cooking and baking classes for kids. Tricia co-produced, hosted, and catered our Forest Garden Party one summer evening, where we wore forest-themed costumes and danced with the fireflies. She also wrote, directed, and produced a wonderful children’s play with Earthaven and neighbor children. Bob Broadhead participates in workdays, manages an onsite trout pond with one of our members, and hosts the coffee bar at the Coffee and Trade, and Seraina Broadhead is a Board Member of Culture’s Edge, Earthaven’s 501(c)3 nonprofit; hosts a study group on eldering for our older folks; and in a widely attended ceremony was inducted as a village  “Elder in Training,” to enthusiastic applause and cheers.

Friends and neighbors serve on Earthaven’s committees, serve in community roles or part-time jobs, or offer classes. Allie Bales serves on our Care Team, Alinahh Ever and Chelsea Spitzer are on our Racial Equity Task Group (and Chelsea was a teacher for our youngest children at The Village School). Chris Ehart is barbeque master at our Tuesday night cookouts, Jason Dionne helps on our Council Hall wood furnace crew, Danu Macon served as our Labor Project Coordinator. Arturo Chaves teaches Cumbia, Merengue and other Mexican dances, Kayla Birstein teaches kickboxing, and Michelle Dione taught Middle Eastern dancing in our Council Hall. Jonathan Greenberg and Sarah Nolan-Poupart cover shifts at our onsite farm, and Karen Budd is the SOIL registrar. Other friends provide garden and farm products, delicious snacks, and homemade crafts at our weekly Coffee and Trade farmer’s market or our annual Bizarre Bazaar — Peggy Austin Malone, Otter Kaase, Chrisa Hickey, Alinahh, and Rainbow Teplitsky.

Longtime area residents Alvin Lytle, Thrisa Murphy, and Lois and Reid Murphy, whose Scots-Irish-descended families have lived in our southern Appalachian mountains for generations, have each brought benefits and local wisdom to our village life, and Alvin, a local organic farmer, offers organic farm products at every Coffee and Trade.

Other neighbors who regularly contribute to or have done so in the recent past, and who regularly attend our social events, include Chris Heath, Brent Hickey, Ed Hickey, Linda Bark, Pripo Teplitsky, June Lytle, Rio Fiore, Sarah Anne Amunson, Ben Kassahun, Luke Cannon, Juniper and John O’Dell, Thomas Doochin and his partner Paeonia, Jane Ware and Don Miller, and Faith Butterfield.

We can never forget Randy and Sally Frazer, who lived here long before Earthaven was founded, not only kindly invested in our Earth Shares Fund in our early days to help us get started, and generously gave us a donation too.

We are so lucky. Thank you all so much!

The post A Village Within a Village appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

“An economy is the interactions and exchanges between people that manage the flow of resources among them,” she said, “and this implies having expenses.”

The “three-legged stool of sustainability” — with economic, environmental, and social values — is distorted in mainstream culture which primarily emphasizes economic rewards but not so much social and environmental aspects of societal well-being. And in a pendulum swing away from this, Earthaven culture primarily emphasizes social and environmental values and tends to discount economics.

Lee told us her economic premises:

Premise A. Everyone needs an economy.

Premise B. The closer your economy is tied to an exploitative system that externalizes costs, the better off you do economically.

Premise C. The more your economy comes from a land-base or from women’s work, the more you struggle economically.

Premise D. “Idealism increased in direct proportion to ones distance from the problem.” a quote by John Galsworthy

Hence folks who’ve earned or inherited money from mainstream economy sources and have no actual experience in say, starting a rural land-based business or a “women’s” service work business, can believe that spiritual values and economic sustainability are somehow mutually exclusive. Or can have strong ideas about what people “should” do to earn an income in ecological or spiritual ways, without realizing that doing so can actually make the person too poor to stay in business.

Knowing how each Earthaven member earns or receives income, Lee created an “economic snapshot” of our current village economy: 14% are self-employed; 38% have retirement or other passive income; 5% do offsite work; and 43%  “piece it together” with multiple part-time jobs and small income streams. We observed that except for retirees and those with outside or family money-based passive incomes, most Earthaven members are challenged economically.

Lee listed current or former onsite member-owned businesses and noted that the majority have gone out of business, moved off the property, or are struggling. She noted the number of entrepreneurial folks who have withdrawn from or left the community, discouraged by the lack of understanding about the need for economic sustainability. She  demonstrated the economies of scale with an analogy about finding food on a tropical island — including guerilla-theater help from several seminar participants — and why we reduce our effectiveness if we each try to create self-reliant homesites, as some permaculturists advise. She advocated specializing instead, with some of us supplying, say, eggs, and others supplying, say, blueberries.

“To create a sustainable economy when we finally become our envisioned village of 150,” she said, “we’ll need at least 10 small businesses employing at least five Earthaven people.” We concluded by listing ways to support onsite businesses, including buying member-made products (which we already do quite well), induce experienced entrepreneurs to move here (and entice those who have left to return), raise funds to kickstart existing businesses up to the next level, offer community work credit for labor that helps onsite businesses, support specialization, subsidize the cost of clearing forest land for agriculture or businesses, and perhaps most important, allow and encourage members to experiment in their businesses and farms — rather than regulating and suppressing experimentation, as we’ve sometimes done in the past.

The presentation was well received, and in fact was one of the best events I’ve seen at Earthaven. Two members started an ad hoc committee to find ways to better support onsite businesses. Lee said she’d realized her goals for the presentation — to be slow-paced, participatory, fun, and smart.”

Many of us are clamoring for her do it again!

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“Blocking potentially gives tremendous power to one or a few individuals, and the only way for that to function successfully is with a check and balance,” advises consensus trainer Tree Bressen (Communities magazine, Summer 2012). “In my experience, every successful consensus system . . . restricts blocking power in order to guard against tyranny of the minority,” she adds (Fall 2012 issue).

Here’s how Earthaven’s new “check and balance” method works:

1. To choose officers in our annual meeting, we adapted a technique from Sociocracy: a series of “go rounds” to nominate and choose people for these roles. We used this method successfully in annual officer elections in our November 25^th and December 9^th Council meetings.
2. To approve incoming new members we retained our previous consensus method.
3. For all other proposals we added criteria for a valid block and a way to test blocks against that criteria (i.e., a block is declared invalid if 85% of Council members present say it’s invalid).

For any remaining blocks that have been declared valid, we use an adaptation of the N St. Consensus Method, in which blockers and several proposal advocates participate in up to three solution-oriented meetings to co-create a new proposal that addresses the same issues as the first proposal. If they cannot, the original proposal comes back to the next Council for a decision using consensus-minus-one (meaning it takes two blocks, not one, to stop the proposal).

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On her next-to-last day at Earthaven, our Forest Children’s Collective tutor Amakiasu (center), and her kids Chioke, 17 (left) and Ayo, 13 (right), sheet-mulched the slope between Greg’s homesite and our place with cardboard and straw. You can also see one of our water-catchment tanks, the greenhouse (with a shower inside for lodgers and neighbors), and in the far left, Greg’s apartment and workshop, and his solar panels.

Another view of our cleaned-up slope. Our lodging units and greenhouse are at the top, and our row of compost bins below. Thanks to the sheet-mulching, people driving into Earthaven, our lodgers, and Greg won’t have to look at a jungly mass of pokeberries, sumacs, tiny poplar trees, blackberries-on-steroids, horse-thistle (eek!), and other assorted “please-don’t-grow-here!” plants. (For about 6 months anyway.) Someday this slope will grow berries!

Thank you, Amakiasu, Ayo, and Chioke. Goodbye . . . and . . . come back soon!

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